Electronic Products - January 2019

IMAGE: RENESAS ELECTRONICS

part, why Alibaba bought chip designer

C-Sky in April.

So far, Google is partnering with

MCU vendors such as Microchip for

devices tied to its IoT cloud offer-

ing. It’s not yet clear whether Google

will make its Edge TPU, announced

in August, a merchant offering for

IoT developers interested in ma-

chine-learning jobs.

2. ON Semi RSL10
   ON Semiconductor is not one of the first
   names that comes to mind in micro-
   controllers. Nevertheless, its RSL10 — a
   Bluetooth Low Energy chip that targets
   apps such as fitness trackers and smart
   lights — blew away the competition in
   the ULP Mark benchmark with scores of
   1,090 at 3 V and 1,260 at 2.1 V.
   The RSL10 trades low power for
   performance. The chip’s Cortex-M3
   runs at a stately 48 MHz. It’s also
   skimpy on memory, with just 76 KB
   SRAM for program memory, 88 KB for
   data memory, and 384-KB flash. How-
   ever, it does pack a 32-bit DSP core to
   run audio codecs.


3. ETA Compute Tensai
   Startup ETA Compute debuted in August
   2017 as a core vendor with a unique
   technology for ultra-low-power chips. It
   described an Arm Cortex-M3 doing use-
   ful work while consuming 5 μW based
   on an asynchronous technique using
   a novel handshake to wake up circuits
   resting at power levels below 0.3 mV.
   The company could not resist the in-
   tense gravity pulling silicon startups into
   AI at the edge. In October, it announced
   that its Tensai inference accelerator can
   run CFAR-10 jobs at just 2 mW, edging
   out the GAP8 chip from startup Green-
   waves that burns as little as 3.7 mW.
   Tensai pairs ETA’s Cortex-M3 with a
   CoolFlux DSP16 core licensed from NXP
   to run convolutional and spiking neural
   networks. The chip should be in produc-
   tion early next year.


4. Microchip SAM R34/35
   Hoping to ride the LoRa wave, Micro-
   chip Technology launched its SAM
   R34/35 in the fall, marrying one of its

microcontrollers with a LoRa transceiver

in a sub-$5 system-in-package. Micro-

chip is the latest of the top MCU vendors

to jump on the LoRa bandwagon. In late

2015, STMicroelectronics announced

its support and, more recently, shipped

board-level products for LoRa.

The SAM R34/35 aims more at low

cost and low power than high perfor-

mance. Its Cortex-M0+ processor tops

out at 48 MHz, although it delivers a

CoreMark/MHz score of 2.46. And the

chip supports, at most, 256-KB flash and

40-KB SRAM. Interestingly, the radio

handles three bands — 137–175 MHz,

410–525 MHz, and the more typically

used 862–1,020 MHz.

5. NXP i.MX-RT600
   The race to bring machine learning to the
   edge of the IoT is already getting crowd-
   ed, but a handful of options stands out.
   NXP Semiconductors’ planned i.MX-
   RT600 stakes out a high-performance
   position for audio apps.
   The chip, not yet in production, in-
   cludes a 600-MHz Tensilica HiFi 4 DSP
   that can deliver eight 16 × 16 MACs per

The DRP is an optional part of the Renesas RZ/A2M key for targeting neural-net jobs.

10 Hot Processors for IoT PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT 25

ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS • electronicproducts.com • JANUARY 2019